


if the day made me heavy (and gravity won)

by captainkilly



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Mild Language, Seer Gellert Grindelwald
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 21:28:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20955176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/pseuds/captainkilly
Summary: One summer night, 1899.Gellert is a Seer. Albus doesn't care.





	if the day made me heavy (and gravity won)

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this marks my second foray into this ship and all its wonderful but angsty complications. I wanted to focus exclusively on a story without scene breaks, which then turned into a long and meandering conversation between these two. 
> 
> Title is lifted out of the song _Fade Into You_, from the show Nashville. The ritual briefly described here is one of my own making, with no basis in canon.

*****

The air over Godric’s Hollow slowly comes alive with the very first signs of dusk. Purple streaks mingle with the blue sky, promising a night of bright stars peeking through the cover of clouds. The day has been shrouded in half-shadow like this: colder than a summer’s day has any right to be, carrying crisper air than the usual humidity that swept the land not a week ago.

Albus Dumbledore doesn’t mind. Today has been a long string of musts and crises, marred by another one of Ariana’s episodes that he briefly feared would finally bring the house crashing down around their ears. The episodes are growing fiercer, longer, more terrible than before. Albus shakes his head. Pinches the bridge of his nose.

Time is rarely his friend these days.

“Oh, finally.” A voice interrupts his musings, lightly accented around the edges of certain words, and Albus raises his head. “I thought you’d _never_ get out of that house!”

He laughs at the sight of Gellert Grindelwald, who is perched atop the garden wall that divides their respective houses. “Neither did I,” Albus confesses genially, “but the coming evening releases me from my duties.”

Gellert’s answering smile is broad, glittering, captivating. “The night, too?” comes the inquiry. “Or should I release you again when the moon is full?”

“The night, too,” confirms Albus.

If his stomach does a treacherous flip and swoop at Gellert’s wordless invitation, Albus pretends not to notice such a thing. He merely bows his head in a vain attempt to hide his amusement at his friend’s slight stumble off the wall. And if the added benefit of that act is not seeing the way Gellert’s hair catches the few bright rays of sunshine, if it means not seeing the liquid gold that pools around the other wizard’s head, if it means not bearing witness to something that makes Albus’s heart drop all the way down in _want_, then he will welcome it.

Albus always has the best intentions, but Gell has a habit of breaking them as quickly as they come.

“You can stay the night.”

“I thought Bathilda didn’t want that?”

Bathilda Bagshot, bless her, is oftentimes the only thing that stands between Albus and insanity. The older historian had set out some ground rules that Gellert had mimicked with mounting incredulity, as if the wizard wasn’t used to anyone telling him what to do. Gellert certainly did his best to break every single one.

“The old bat’s gone for a few days. Said she was going to interview a vampire or something?” Gellert shrugs at the sight of Albus’s raised eyebrow. “I honestly didn’t think to ask more than that, Al. The last time I asked anything, I was given a treatise on the rights of the merfolk.”

“And your immediate response to her being gone is to invite me over and break most of her rules in the process,” Albus surmises. He’s not surprised when Gellert nods vigorously. “That’s not at all predictable.”

“Pfah, who cares? Certainly not you, you’ve been dying to get out of your house for over a week now. I’ve already built us a sleeping place on the floor.”

Sometimes, Albus truly hates him. “The floor?”

“You do remember my complaints about my lumpy mattress, yes? The floor is better. Some charms, some pillows, who cares?”

Albus shrugs. He’s long given up the attempt to make sense of just why Gellert, expelled from Durmstrang as he is, is able to perform the magic he’s seen throughout the summer. He’s also given up on any attempts to sway Gellert from whatever harebrained idea landed in his skull, though he will occasionally intervene if things get too bad. There’s something entirely wild about the foreign wizard. Something untamed, something fey.

He thinks he follows Gellert into the house because of that, even when everything inside of him is screaming at him to turn away.

Bathilda’s house is a museum in its own right. Albus dances carefully from one free patch of floor to the next in the hope he won’t bring any research crashing down from chairs or tables. Gellert sets out the path, picked out carefully between boxes and a myriad of paperwork that makes sense to no one but a historian, and he takes care not to stray from that.

Gellert’s bedroom is a cramped space at the end of a long corridor. The bed is shoved to one side, the wardrobe to another. The few personal belongings all seem to be stuffed in the trunk next to the door. Underneath the only window in the room is a rather unceremoniously strewn-out pile of blankets and pillows. Albus smiles at the sight of it.

“That looks better than the bed,” he says.

“Right?” Gellert, next to him, shifts from foot to foot. “I thought we could just talk, or do that ritualistic meditation we found in _Temporalis_ a few days ago.”

“I’ve been meaning to do the latter. It’s supposed to help with Occlumency, too.”

“Meditate first, talk later?”

“Sure.”

One of Albus’s favourite things about Gellert Grindelwald (and there are a fair few favourite things, if he’s being honest) is the fact that Gellert was born curious. There is nothing he won’t pursue, nothing he won’t try, nothing he will discard straight out of hand.

“I still think you’d do all right in Ravenclaw,” he says conversationally as he drops onto the blankets. He’s not that surprised to find several cushioning and comfort charms beneath him. “Even when you think they’re stuffy.”

“They _are_. You’d be _so_ boring if you were a Ravenclaw.”

“I’d still be me.”

Gellert snorts in obvious disbelief. “You? You’re Gryffindor through and through. I half suspect your Patronus is a lion.”

“It’s not.”

“Mine isn’t a snake, either,” warns Gellert, before Albus can so much as say it.

“You do make a rather terrible Slytherin. Professor Yaxley would have a most dreadful time keeping you in line.”

“I make a terrible everything.” Gellert grins unapologetically as he seats himself across from Albus. “I’d rather be free to do what I want. But we’re straying from our desire to not have a conversation first, you know.”

Albus rolls his eyes good-naturedly. It is always like this every time they meet. Theirs are endless conversations, whispered and shouted and written and read. It is rare for them to be quiet for longer stretches of time, though evidently that is the goal tonight.

“Fine,” he acquiesces with a nod, “later.”

“Just so.”

Only Gellert can make that sound teasing and promising at once. Blue eyes twinkle merrily at him, as if daring him to say another word. Albus knows better than to rise to the challenge. Besides, he _has _been rather curious about how a mere meditation can affect Occlumency.

He stretches his arms out toward his companion. Turns his palms upward in silent supplication.

Gell’s hands are warm and heavy upon his own.

For a moment, he just breathes. Gellert’s room is mercifully free of the rest of the house’s distractions. He can focus on the crack near the windowsill, the scratch on the glass, the slightly raised floorboard near the edge of the blankets. He doesn’t want to look away from the blue eyes that are watching him, observing him, before darkening into the haze of full Occlusion.

Albus turns inward.

_Let me see,_ he begins wordlessly, _let me become._

There are staircases in his mind that remind of Hogwarts. He can trace them through his head and let them take him from one memory to the next. He descends one now. Feels the stone solidify beneath his feet. There is a trick step that doesn’t plague him now, though it took him a while to figure out what would set it off.

There are more chambers than there are stairs.

He stands in the corridor of his mind and wonders where to go.

_Interregnum, _he thinks, in accordance with the ritual. He envisions the ‘point me’-spell, spinning in his mind’s eye like a compass attempting to divine the north. _Interregnum. _

He offers it only twice.

His hands burn.

He is not at Hogwarts. He is not even in his own mind. He is limbless before the great Void. He is in the ocean. He is underneath three feet of sand.

He is not Albus. He is more Albus than he’s ever been.

He is everywhere but here.

There is a weight in his hands that he cannot shake.

He coughs. Splutters.

A red haze wraps around him, then lets go just as fast as it came.

His hands are tied to gravity.

“Al?”

His eyes open to chaos at the sound of his name.

Gellert’s mouth is taut. Something _other_ rages beneath his skin.

“What–”

_Interregnum._

Gellert’s too-certain voice in his head, offering the third.

The dark before him is nothing but a gaping maw.

_I will not stand – hear me – have I become?_

Albus shakes his head at the echoes that seek to fill it. Lets them slide off of him in much the same way water slides off a duck. He doesn’t know why they’re here.

And then, oh then, then he does.

Gellert has never been capable of turning away. He knows this as surely as the sun rises every morning. There is a fight that uncoils lazily within and winds itself tight around the wizard’s wiry frame on the best of days. There is a challenge written in Gellert’s bones, demanded in his silver tongue, begged for in his blood.

For the first time, Albus understands the strange hunger that thrums in Gellert’s magic.

_Seer’s blood,_ his mind supplies helpfully as Gellert gasps and keens out a howling challenge, _would you yet know more?_

“Gell?”

He hates how weak his voice sounds. How insecure.

Gellert doesn’t answer. He is caught in the thrall of whatever he Sees, and what he Sees causes pain. Claws dig into Albus’s flesh. The window rattles. The sky turns dark.

Throughout it all, Gellert _screams_.

“Sshh, sshh, I’ve got you.” Albus pushes Gellert back until the wizard’s resting against the wall and his legs entangle with the blankets. Wordlessly, wandlessly, he casts an Imperturbable Charm on the room. “I’m here.”

He almost _isn’t_, when he catches sight of Gellert’s face.

Gellert’s one eye has darkened to a near-black in which there is no light. There is no spark behind it that betrays a living soul has made a home within. There is abyss, and void, and darkness. It is perfectly still.

The other eye is a milky white, moving rapidly, blinking against the light in the room as though it is attempting to absorb it. It fixes on Albus, then looks away again, then turns back to Albus, then looks right through him. He shivers in distaste.

“Through the one by whom we now do all See,” he whispers, tightening his grasp on Gellert’s arms, “through the Interregnum that be your guide, return to me. Return to me.” He makes no demands of the heavens. Wouldn’t know how to muster the arrogance for it, not right now. Instead, he remembers to ask. “Please let him leave.”

Unspoken is the fear. _I don’t know what to do without him, please don’t take him, please lay no claim to him. _He leaves bruises on Gellert’s arms, nail imprints on his too-pale skin, traces of his lips on his brow. _Return him safe to me._

Gellert’s breathing grows uneven. A frown creases his brow. There is something lurking behind the lighter eye now that Albus has no care for: whatever Gellert Sees, it has sunk its claws so deep that not even the light can keep it out for long.

Thoughts of Ariana come, unbidden. Ariana, trapped in darkness. Ariana, hand outstretched, darkness swirling out to meet him. Ariana, and death.

“Oh no, you don’t,” grunts Albus. Shakes his head to clear it from the rapid dark. Refocuses on the eyes of the wizard in front of him. “I’m not letting go.”

Gellert’s eyes roll into the back of his skull. He is almost weightless, with Albus’s hands being the only anchors that hold him afloat in the water of his mind. There is a rasp in his chest, a hum in his breath, a song in his mind. Albus can almost reach out and touch it.

_A Legilimens can go insane from the mind of a Seer, _he remembers, just in time. His hand hovers over Gellert’s brow. _There is so much you don’t know._

It doesn’t stop him from pulling Gellert back out of the abyss.

“Come on, come on, wake up,” he mutters, lightly tapping against Gellert’s flushed cheeks. Their breathing is jagged and almost in sync: Albus’s in panic, Gellert’s in thrall. “Gell, _please_.”

_Come back to me._

Albus closes his eyes. Soundlessly whispers the mantra over and over and over again. _Come home to where the sky meets land instead of sea, come home to me. Come home to where the sky meets land instead of sea. Come home to me. Come home to where the sky meets land instead of sea. _He repeats it until he dares open his eyes. _Come home to me._

He almost collapses with relief at the sight that greets him.

Gellert’s eyes are now a very familiar summer’s sky blue.

His voice, less familiar in its rasp, is the sweetest sound Albus has ever heard.

“A-Al?”

Albus bites his lip. Gellert never sounds like this. He’s always too sure of himself, too confident, and the fervour of it infuses every waking moment. Gellert never sounds tired, or angry, or.. scared. He never sounds uncertain like now.

“What the h-hell just happened?”

Albus is aware that his own voice trembles and breaks in the middle of the sentence, as though the words themselves are stumbling faster in his brain than his mouth can get a grip on. He doesn’t care that the question lifts up into a crescendo of worry. He’s tired of controlling his voice, of bowing his head and not leaving his mark on the world around him.

Mostly, he’s tired of Gell _lying_ to him.

He draws a deep breath. Fixes his gaze on Gellert’s wild, blinking eyes. His face is not yet animated with the vibrance that normally infuses quick smiles and small gestures. He doesn’t look quite like himself. A part of Gellert seems to be someplace entire _else_.

If Albus was honest with himself, he would admit this scares him.

He swallows the fear down until it burns his belly. “I knew there was something different about you.” He says it quietly. Doesn’t dare to sound too accusing. “You Saw something just now, didn’t you?”

“I See many things. Real. Not real. Who knows?”

Albus closes his eyes. Counts to ten the way his mother taught him. Opens his eyes. Ignores the urge to count to ten again and again until Gellert’s eyes don’t see right through him anymore.

“Divination is one of the most unreliable forms of magic,” he says instead. Is proud of the way his voice only trembles a little. “Everyone thinks it can tell you the future, but so much of it relies on self-fulfilling prophecies.”

Gellert’s mouth quirks upward, then, so briefly that Albus questions if he saw it at all. “I didn’t read your tea leaves,” he says, and only Gellert can soften that to not sound like an admonishment. Albus’s ears are burning all the same. “I just See things. Future, present, sometimes past. Mostly future – potential, choices, realities upon realities, dreams within dreams. Always have, but it got worse in Russia. Worse still, now.”

“How come?”

Gellert’s eyes flutter shut. “Curiosity. My entire line on my mother’s side is drenched in Seer blood. I saw things as a child, but couldn’t hold on to them long enough. They were so fragmented, so convoluted. They faded as quickly as they came. It used to drive me mad.” His voice is wistful, airy in the space between them, before his mouth curves downward and the tone darkens. “I wanted to hold on to them, so I could evaluate them. Learn from them. Control them.”

“Of course you did.”

His laugh is soft, and Albus thinks he’s never heard a better sound in the world than this. “I found a ritual in an old book, as one does.” Gellert speaks with his hands, paints pictures in the air between them, and Albus traces the patterns in quiet study. “It said it could wake the more dormant aspects of the magic in your blood, so you could learn to exercise full control over them. I did it alone, in a cellar, connected to the earth because Seers are born of air, and the things.. Al, the things I saw..” His blonde hair dances around his head as he moves in memory and disbelief. “I’m told it took them two days to find me. I have no memory of it. I just cycled in and out of consciousness, not eating and not sleeping, seeing the whole world in a web of magic unlike anything you’ve ever dreamed of. I was gone, disconnected, and yet I’d never been more alive.”

“You looked like that again, just now.” Albus’s confession hangs between them like a sharp blade. “Like you weren’t going to wake from what you saw. Like the vision was all there is.” He hugs himself in an attempt to breathe warmth into how cold his hands have become. He pauses a moment. Tilts his head in contemplation. “How long ago was the ritual?”

Gellert’s laugh is louder now. His eyes open as he leans back against the wall. “You’re asking all the right questions,” the boy says. A fire dances in his gaze. Amusement leaps into his reply. “Not too long ago.”

“_This_ is what got you expelled?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I had thought–” Albus trails off. Shakes his head as if to clear it. He has thought many things about Gellert’s expulsion from school. None of them were anything like this. He settles for a mutter. “I thought it would’ve been something else.”

“Something darker?”

Albus nods.

“You don’t think blood magic is dark?”

His eyebrow raises as he looks Gellert in the eye. “Should I?”

“Most people do.”

“I’m not most people.”

It comes out a good deal more stubborn than he means it to. It comes out a lot more certain than he feels, too, but that is a worry for when he is alone again. Of course he’s heard the stories about dabbling in such magic. Of course there is distaste for it, at Hogwarts and elsewhere, because it is a magic that demands more than most are willing to give. And of course Gellert, stupid glorious bright Gellert, gave freely to the pursuit of knowledge most absolute.

Albus envies him.

“I know you’re not,” says Gellert quietly. Heat buzzes around his belly as Gellert’s eyes finally blink into focus and lock with his. There is something entirely _other _in his gaze. “You’re different, like me.”

“If I’m like you, then I can’t be different.”

“Semantics, Al, really?”

“What did you See?” Albus shoots back, not caring how the question darkens Gellert’s eyes and how the air around them seems to constrict and tighten at the demand. His fist curls around the blanket beneath him. “I don’t care about what you Saw when we first met, I really don’t.” He hopes the lie doesn’t colour the words that tumble out of his mouth. He wants to know all the things that stop Gellert from turning away from him. His breath hitches in his throat like a traitor. “I care about what happened just now. You looked.. you sounded.. Fuck, Gel, you were _terrified_.”

“Was I?”

“Don’t lie to me.” He’s tired. Too tired for this. “Some Seers don’t remember anything of what happened to them during a vision. You _clearly_ do.”

“Do I?”

Albus snorts. “Fuck you.”

Gellert raises his eyebrows at that. Mutters something back in a sing-song mixture of German and Russian that sounds entirely too much like a challenge. Albus huffs at it, not understanding the rougher syllables any better than he did the last time Gellert looked him dead in the eye and spat similar words out. There is a flutter deep down in his belly that shouldn’t exist. He looks away.

“I remember everything,” comes the whispered confession, then, and Albus’s heart breaks at the sound. His gaze fixes on Gellert’s hands, twisting circles in his lap. “Seers who prophecize don’t recall a thing they said in trance, but Seers like myself.. we remember everything down to the smallest details. Even the things we wish we didn’t.”

“You Saw something bad tonight.”

“Yes.”

Albus reaches for Gellert before he can reconsider what he’s doing. His hand finds Gellert’s and stills its nervous motions. “Merlin, you’re freezing!” he remarks, almost withdrawing again in shock. Gellert’s hands tremble beneath his own in response. He squeezes down, tight, willing warmth into the icy skin. Then, he softens his tone. “What did you See?”

“It doesn’t matter. I won’t let it happen. I won’t allow it.”

“Gell..”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” A tumbled rush of words, a sharp intake of breath, a wobble in his tone. Albus’s fingers interlace with Gellert’s unthinkingly. “I don’t want to.. I don’t want this to be here. Not tonight.”

Albus knows better than to push. “All right,” he says. Acquiesces by letting go, by letting himself drop sideways onto the pile of pillows and blankets strewn out over the floor. Laces his voice with a warning that says _later_. “Not tonight.”

He’s not surprised when Gellert’s response is to also drop sideways onto the pile. The wizard’s eyes shine suspiciously bright in the twilight that has crept into the room. Albus chooses to ignore it the same way he tries to ignore how _close _Gellert is now.

Matters aren’t helped when Gellert grabs a hold of the blanket behind him and pulls it over both their bodies.

“I’m freezing. So are you.”

Albus wishes it was as simple as Gellert’s accented murmurs make it sound. And maybe, yes, maybe it is? He sighs as the warmth settles over him. Thinks that he will almost certainly fall asleep if he dares close his eyes.

He’s a fucking Gryffindor _coward_.

Gellert’s face is mere inches away from his own. In the fading light, his hair shifts and changes into the shimmering silver of an invisibility cloak. There is a drowsy quality to his smile, slower and softer than usual, but his gaze dances across Albus’s face with an intensity that makes him blush head to toe. Every breath in his lungs is smoke and embers. He tastes midnight on his tongue. He doesn’t dare look away.

Gellert is as beautiful as forest fires are beautiful.

He is still holding his hand.

“Al?”

“Mm?”

“I’m sorry about the ritual.”

“That wasn’t very clever of you,” agrees Albus, though what he really means to say is _you’re a goddamn idiot, Gellert Grindelwald_. Can’t help but snipe at him just a little. “If I’d _known_ about your Seer stuff, I’d never have allowed it.”

Gellert rolls his eyes. “I didn’t know it’d do _that_!”

“Really. You didn’t think that maybe, just maybe, doing a ritual meditation that allows you to see your inner landscape would also affect your Sight?” Albus doesn’t care that his voice lands on a near-hysterical note. Gellert’s so _stupid_, sometimes. “You didn’t think that after those.. I don’t know.. experiments? You didn’t think you’d be swept up in this?”

“Yeah,” bites Gellert out, and the air around them tastes like winter snow because of it, “that’s right. I didn’t think.”

“Bullshit.”

Gellert’s hand clenches around his own. In the twilight, his eyes are dark and infinite. Albus squeezes back, hard, and leans in even closer.

Maybe he’s a Gryffindor, still, after all.

“Want to know what I think?” he whispers. “I think you wanted to continue those experiments – and just why did Durmstrang expel you for those, anyway?” He raises an eyebrow. “I think you want to know more, you want to See more, and when you do you try your best to un-See it by actively working against whatever is going to make that vision come to pass.”

Gellert’s face is the picture of a storm.

“I think,” Albus dares, “that you wanted to tell me all along that you’re a Seer. You just didn’t know how.”

“You’re not exactly open to divination,” mutters Gellert.

“Tea leaves, crystal balls, Mars being bright tonight, I still don’t care about any of that.”

_I only care about you, _he thinks, wildly, and believes his eyes to be an open book.

Gellert’s own eyes widen in response. “I was expelled because Durmstrang only allows experiments in the form of Dark Arts. They don’t care if you hurt anyone else, as long as it’s nothing permanent.” A half-shrug. “They don’t understand experimenting on yourself, especially not the kind of experiments that require personal sacrifice of any kind. They only understand it when you’re the one demanding sacrifice, not giving it freely.”

“That sounds lonely.”

A sharp intake of breath. “Maybe.” Gellert’s whisper is hot against his face. “Would you have done it? Would you sacrifice yourself to yourself?”

“Yes.” Albus’s reply is immediate. “For the greater good, yes, I would.”

There is something in Gellert’s gaze he cannot name. Fleeting, ferocious, damning. Albus shivers as the wizard’s free hand brushes against his cheek. Gellert’s fingers settle in his hair, slide around his ear, fall down to the nape of his neck. Their noses touch.

Gellert’s lips brush against his own. Soft, inquisitive, fleeting.

Albus presses back, answering, demanding, _needing_.

He feels Gellert’s lips open beneath his own. The wizard’s tongue runs experimentally over Albus’s lower lip, teasing and dancing. Heat shoots through his belly. He gasps against Gellert’s mouth. Pulls him closer still, until their legs entwine and there is no space between them. He smirks at the sound Gellert makes when their tongues meet. Keening, needing, desperate.

_Want, want, _demands the wizard. Albus doesn’t know if it’s spoken aloud or just in his head. Decides he doesn’t care when Gellert’s kiss deepens. He revels in the caress, the thrill, the hunger. _Liebling, liebling._

He allows himself to be pushed back, to tumble onto his back with Gellert’s weight shifting against and on top of him. Albus trails sloppy kisses down his neck, nips at the wizard’s collarbone, feels Gellert arch into his touch. He tastes nothing but desire on Gellert’s tongue. Rolls his hips experimentally and is rewarded with a gasp.

“Okay?” he asks as he feels Gellert’s grip on his neck tighten. “Gell?”

“Mhmm. Okay.” A cat’s purr brushes against his cheek. “You’ll be the death of me, but okay.”

He chuckles. “You’re one to talk,” he hisses out seconds later as Gellert moves against him _just so _and Albus thinks he could name all the constellations that appear before his eyes. “Merlin, can you not?”

“Sorry,” is the answering laugh.

Albus curses out loud as Gellert’s motion to stop only serves to make things worse.

“Just so you know,” Gellert says conversationally, “I’m filing _that one_ away for future reference.”

“Future reference, huh?”

Gellert looks remarkably unapologetic. “There will be a next time.”

“Did you See that, or is your ego just that big?”

“You wound me, Al, you really do.”

“Hey, you will get no complaint from me if there _is _a next time.” Albus grins openly now. “I just like messing with you.”

“No complaint, huh?”

Trust Gellert to latch on to _that_ part of it.

“None,” he murmurs, and lightly brushes his lips against Gell’s as confirmation. “Except for that we should’ve done this sooner.”

“Mmm. Yes.”

Gellert’s hand comes to rest on his chest. Blonde curls tickle his nose before settling under his chin. The wizard’s head is on his chest, and Albus wraps his arms around Gell’s wiry frame as tightly as he dares. He breathes in deep.

He thinks his heart might yet burst with Gellert’s presence.

Above their heads, against the window, rain pitter-patters in droplets small and great. Albus feels the water twist out of the sky, hears it come down to the marching pattern of his own heartbeat. He can sense the clouds build and collapse, come together and depart, with the rise and fall of Gellert’s chest against his own.

“I think you made it rain,” comes the sleepy murmur.

“It’s been a while.” There’s no point in pretending he’s not responsible for it. Weather magic has always been common in the Dumbledore family, after all. He winces as the first rumble of thunder reaches his ears. “_That_ _one_, however, is yours.”

“Why, so it is.”

Albus has never quite gotten the hang of thunderstorms. They are too electric, too full of fire, too much potential destruction. Yet, he breathes in petrichor. Exhales to the crackle of electricity that shoots across the sky above their heads. He owns the darkened clouds, now.

He doesn’t dare ask if that means Gellert is his, too.

“I’m going to invest in an umbrella.”

Albus blinks at the sudden remark.

“What? Why?”

Gellert’s chuckle reverberates through Albus’s chest. The buzz of it sends a thrill down his spine. “If I kiss you, out there, I don’t want to get my hair wet all the time.”

Albus flushes. He’s grateful for the dark, certain as he is that his cheeks are bright red, but the heat in his skin is something he cannot hide away. He flushes deeper crimson, still, as Gellert makes an amused sound in the back of his throat. “I can control it,” he says, half-convinced, “if I know you’re going to do it.”

“Now where’s the fun in that?”

“Planned kisses can be fun, I think.”

“You think too much.”

_Not around you_, Albus wants to say. _I have never known how to stop losing my head around you._ He sighs out loud. “Kissing in the rain probably is fun too,” he says instead. He smiles at the thought of Gellert’s hair plastered to his face, his cheeks wet with rivulets of water, his lips tasting like summer and thunder all at once. He wants this more than anything. Offers. “We should try it.”

“Not now. I don’t want to move, now.” Gellert’s hand finds his own. “I just want to be here.”

“I wasn’t going to go outside in the dark in the middle of a thunderstorm,” mutters Albus, shaking his head as much as Gellert’s tight hold on him will allow. “I was going to wait. I was going to kiss you later, after we’d eaten strawberries and talked about if we are going to keep the Ministry for Magic or not. I was going to kiss you once you’d argued yourself hoarse about the perils of democracy, because you always look a little bit insane and a whole lot more passionate than you’ve got any right to be then.” His cheeks still burn with every word he breathes into the air between them, but Gellert’s hand tightens in that way of his that says _keep going_ and so Albus talks. “I was going to kiss you once I knew you weren’t going to.. weren’t going to say that I’d made a mistake. Until I knew you wouldn’t.. wouldn’t push me away. Until I was sure it was real.”

Albus has always been comfortable with silence. He typically doesn’t mind that it can sometimes stretch out and fill up the entire space between people. Words are only a very small part of conversation, after all, and there is so much that is too big to fit into such constraints. He’s not sure what this silence means, now, but Gellert’s hand is still locked in his and so it cannot be as bad as all that. He lets out a sigh at the feeling.

Gellert’s lips are warm against his neck as the wizard shifts against him. “And then I kissed you, and there was no mistaking that.” It’s not a question, so Albus doesn’t dignify it with a reply. Gellert’s breath is hot on his skin. He feels every word as though Gellert breathes their existence straight into his bloodstream. “I didn’t consider that you wanted to kiss me back at all until tonight. I thought you were just being nice, you see. All those days where we’d just sit so close that I could feel my heartbeat.. those days when you’d brush your hand against mine and not withdraw.. I thought that was just me, seeing things. When I kissed you, tonight, I thought I was letting something end.” The laugh buries itself in the crook just beneath his ear. “I would’ve kissed you sooner if I’d known it wasn’t an end. Almost did.”

“When?”

“Hmm. That day when you were _so_ mad about what I said.”

Albus laughs, then, too. “I still think it’s ill-advised to kill for the sake of the greater good,” he says. Gellert had been so flippant about the potential damage, so unconcerned about the impact of that view. “You and I might be wrong, sometimes, and the burden of that should not fall on the potentially innocent.” He tries to convince himself by saying it out loud, but it’s hard to talk himself into anything when Gellert’s hair tickles his cheek and his pulse thrums with magic. He blinks. Attempts to refocus. “Why _didn’t_ you kiss me then?”

“I was rather.. admiring the view.”

The gentle purr sends lightning bolts through his spine. Overhead, the air lights up with flashes of silver. He counts down the seconds between lightning and thunder, but can’t hear the rumble over the roar of his own heartbeat anymore. Gellert’s fingers dip and weave between his shirt and waistband, flighty and yet steadier than Albus feels. He groans. Curses in the next second at the biting, searing, wonderful feeling of Gellert’s nails raking meaningless patterns across his skin.

Gellert’s own curse is soft in his ear, then. “Al, _bitte_,” comes the plea, and Albus smirks at the sound. His amusement fades at the whisper that follows it. “I know myself not with you.”

He turns his head then, finally, as Gellert tilts his own back to observe him.

“What do you mean?” he asks, once he trusts his voice again.

To Gellert’s credit, and Albus’s ruin, the wizard doesn’t look away. “I don’t see clearly when I’m with you. There are thousands of futures between us, more than I will ever have with another. And I don’t know which of those will happen, because I can’t even see the next seconds with you. Every time I think I have it, and I find myself again, you smile at me or say something and the world shifts away from me again like it is sand slipping through an hourglass.” Gellert’s voice is hoarse, close to breaking, and Albus’s hand comes to rest in his hair in silent comfort. “I don’t know how to stop the future. I’m weightless, defenseless, and I fear the coming fall.”

“There’s nothing to fear.”

“How can you even–?!” Quick-tempered, blazing hot, Gellert abruptly sits upright. The air around him crackles. “How can you be this _calm_?”

Albus gazes back quietly, knowingly. He doesn’t rise to the challenge.

“I feel it, too,” he says instead. “Whatever else you Saw, I need you to know that’s true.”

“Not forever. Not until the end.”

Gellert’s eyes are haunted, hollow in the dim light. His smile is brittle. Outside, the rain is as relentless and merciless as they are to each other here within. There is darkness inside the room that Albus cannot touch, even as his hands reach for Gellert and his heart keeps betraying his head.

“You’re the Seer,” he admonishes, “but our _choices_ determine who we are. Not our abilities.”

“You won’t choose me.”

The certainty hurts.

“I choose you now, here.”

Unasked goes the question _is that enough?_. Unsaid, then, the rest of it. Albus doesn’t know the future. Doesn’t think he wants to know, not really, not when it takes him away from this bed and this night. All he wants is here. All he fears, too.

He doesn’t want the sun to rise again.

All he loves falls back into his arms, boneless and homeless, broken and remade. Gellert’s hands leave dark imprints on his skin. Gellert’s eyes burn with knowing, fierce and proud, and Albus thinks he sees the light slipping forth from the easy smile that follows. Gellert’s body tangles with his, fey, seductive, wild, and he almost forgets to breathe.

“All I see is you,” he murmurs, magic spilling forth between his breath and his kiss, “all I am is of you.”

Gellert’s brow comes to rest against his own. He tastes amusement in the air between them. The offering so casual, so light, before the world shifts between them again.

“You have me.”

_Until whatever end._


End file.
